PSNH continued repairs Friday to remedy dual power outages

ROCHESTER — The Public Service of New Hampshire continued repairs to its system in Rochester on Friday after the area was struck by dual power outages earlier in the week.

According to Public Service of New Hampshire Spokesman Martin Murray, the company switched about 10 customers in downtown Rochester onto portable generators at 3:30 on Friday to make additional repairs.

He said on Friday that the repairs would take about an hour, and that power for those customers would momentarily be out when they are switched back over to the main system.

"It's not going to be long, but it's going to be noticeable," Murray said.

An outage on Wednesday caused PSNH to lose about 1,100 customers from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. On Thursday morning at 11:15 a.m., another outage occurred, effecting about 500 customers, many of them being the same customers affected by the previous outage, with all but 100 of them having power restored by noon.

Murray said that the company had to import portable generators for those 100 customers from 5 p.m. until 9:15 p.m., when power was restored for all the customers except the Profile Bank on Wakefield Street.

Power to the bank was later restored at 2:45 p.m. on Friday.

According to Murray, the cause of the two outages can be traced back to cable faults in the underground system. He said that while the two causes are similar, they happened in different locations on the same circuit, and it is not clear if the two cable faults are connected.

"We can't say with certainty that they were related," Murray said.

As of Friday afternoon, the incident was still being investigated by PSNH.

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